team.blueMSP team.blue Chooses LucidLink Filespaces™ to Provide Easy Remote File Access for CustomersBetter Utilized Object Storage Increases Customer Growth, Retention & Value-Added Opportunities 

For nearly two decades, Zitcom, a subsidiary of the Combell Group, was one of Denmark’s biggest providers of hosting to small and medium-sized companies. In June 2019, Zitcom became team.blue when the Combell Group joined forces with the TransIP Group and the Register Group. team.blue now serves two million customers across Europe with plans to expand its business worldwide.

Managed service providers (MSPs) like team.blue require value- added services to retain customers and grow their business. For them, choosing the right technology partner to deliver value-added services can enhance success and improve business continuity.

Prior to our LucidLink partnership, we had to turn down deals because we didn’t have the

right solution to meet our prospects’ needs. Now, we are able to retain and secure more customers and maximize our use of Cloudian object storage.

Michael Lassen, Infrastructure Lead, team.blue

As the world shifts towards cloud solutions, one way that MSPs have sought to add value is through the use of object storage, pushing its usage into the mainstream. Object storage is a power-ful solution to an age-old problem when it comes to reliability, scalability, and ease of storage management. However, object storage does not come with a file system layer. MSPs that use object storage are looking for additional use cases to drive capacity consumption and effectively grow revenue. Key to this is recognizing that object storage can be used for more than just backup or archive use cases.

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About team.blueteam.blue is an MSP and a leading digital enabler for companies and entrepreneurs. The group was created by merging Combell Group, TransIP Group, and Register Group in 2019.

IndustryManaged Service Provider

Business ChallengeWithout the right value-add service partner, team.blue was missing out on sales opportunities. The group also wanted to maximize their investment in object storage.

SolutionLucidLink Filespaces delivers a cloud-native file system designed to maximize object storage by using it as if it were a local disk. Filespaces helped team.blue to expand their use case opportunities for customers, including fast, secure, file-level access to data backed by object storage.

Results• Increased sales and customer retention• Monetized more than just backups• Maximized use of object storage• Delivered high capacity storage at local disk speed

Business Challengeteam.blue is now one of the largest hosting companies in Europe. For nearly two decades they have demonstrated stable growth by providing a hosting solution that creates value for clients and their businesses. team.blue needed to resolve two significant issues. In the first instance, they needed to develop the means to provide customers with quick and secure remote access to object storage. Secondly, they needed to enable those customers to utilize object storage in a way that would preclude refactoring of applications, avoid additional costs, and maintain simplified workflows. team.blue only utilized object storage for secondary and tertiary archive tier use cases.

Because of these unresolved challenges, team.blue’s sales team was passing up many opportu-nities where they were unable to provide advanced file services for object storage as part of their customer offerings. 

team.blue looked at their existing customer base, their current production environment, as well as various ways they could reduce their customers’ storage costs. This led them to seek a solution that would provide them with more effective ways to use object storage.

Being able to edit easily and share large data files remotely, is integral to the future of cost-effective and efficient workflows. team.blue was actively looking for a platform that would allow user collab-oration—especially for the small to medium-sized companies in their customer base that wanted to skip the file server and go directly to the cloud. They sought an affordable solution to help mitigate the high cost of storage arrays and legacy file storage solutions, while still providing on-de-mand file access. 

“We needed help to be able to offer affordable in-guest storage for machine instance,” said Michael Lassen, infrastructure lead at team.blue. “We have large enterprise customers who are spending thousands upon thousands of dollars on SAN storage. Of course, our main priority with solutions like these is stability.”

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team.blueThe Cloud File System for Object Storage

SummaryAs workflows have become more complex and dispersed worldwide, business demands quick and reliable data access. LucidLink Filespaces transforms object storage into general-use storage to optimize cloud data access for distributed workflows, regardless of file size. This approach dramatically enhances remote team collaboration and productivity and allows service providers like team.blue to: • Increase sales and customer retention• Maximize the use of object storage• Deliver high capacity storage at local disk speed • Monetize more than just static data such as backup and long term archive • Provide seamless read and write streaming access • Maintain a flexible, cross-platform, SaaS solution

With the enhanced functionality of LucidLink Filespaces in front of Cloudian, team.blue was able to augment their object storage and provide a seamless way of moving data to where it is needed, unlock-ing the potential of customer data to help customers optimize workflows and increase productivity. LucidLink enables team.blue to provide a new service offering to not only retain customers but also to attract new ones via a stable, secure, on-demand cloud file service.

About LucidLinkLucidlink Filespace is a cloud-native fileservice that enables high-performanceaccess to large files, improvingorganizational workload efficiency andproductivity.

SolutionLucidLink Filespaces delivers a cloud-native file system that sits on top of object storage – which fundamentally changes the way data can be consumed. team.blue was already using Cloudian’s object storage. By combining LucidLink Filespaces with Cloudian object storage, users and applications can securely access data and files over distance. LucidLink enables object storage to be used in far more diverse ways than previously possible. 

Before using LucidLink, team.blue only used object storage for secondary or tertiary archive purposes. LucidLink combined with Cloudian object storage is a perfect fit, delivering high capacity storage without having to rewrite access. 

Without LucidLink, team.blue was passing up on a large amount of potential business. By provisioning object storage via LucidLink, they can provide a highly resilient, scalable, and cost-effective storage solution, and an easy-to-use file system layer that works like customers already expect.

“Before finding LucidLink, we looked at four to five different products. They weren’t comparable in terms of working in the real world and for our customers,” stated Michael Lassen, Infrastructure Lead at team.blue. “Today, many customers will say they can just simply buy a license.  But, I explain to them why LucidLink is a better product. With LucidLink, customers don’t even know where the data is stored because Filespaces performs just like a local drive.”

When switching over to LucidLink, the process was entirely undetect-ed by team.blue’s customers, and it went without any disruption to their services. Now, team.blue customers simply use a LucidLink mount point, which allows them direct access to remote storage. 

Customers receive maximum business value with this new solution offering from team.blue, and team.blue has the correct value-add partner to support its future growth. 

team.blueMSP Case Study